Arent all MPEG patents expired?

No, they’re in a patent pool. There’s what looks like a relatively up-to-date list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via-LA#H.265/HEVC_licensors

5203 active patents for HEVC, 1480 for H.264. That's just plain insane! I get that video formats are complex, but complex enough to consist of 5000+ distinct, nontrivial inventions?

Many of those are just marginally related, and might not apply to the actual standard.

Confusingly, there are two different MPEGs in this context.

MPEG the standards group is organized by ISO and IEC, along with JPEG.

The one you’re thinking of - MPEG LA, the licensing company - is a patent pool (which has since been subsumed by a different one[1]) that’s unaffiliated with MPEG the standards group.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via-LA

So what good is it to have a separate entity doing the standard when the standard is unaffordable outside the top 500?

> And the MPEG folks were so cool with video, all that licensing BS. Sounds great. No thanks!

Not wrong, but this is a different topic/objection than the GP's 'being locked into Apple's ecosystem'.

And as the Wikipedia article for HEIC shows, there's plenty of support for the format, even in open source OSes.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...

As far as I know, that's only support for the container format. You can't actually decode HEIC without also installing libde265, which you are supposed to have a license for. I'm not even sure how you'd go about getting an individual license.

> You can't actually decode HEIC without also installing libde265, which you are supposed to have a license for. I'm not even sure how you'd go about getting an individual license.

Debian doesn't seem to have a problem with it:

* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libde265

* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libheif